Recent reviews by Ya Boi Sheev

After 50 minutes of gameplay, my second time flying the ship ended with it sitting on a tree and me stuck in the exit hatch unable to move anything but the camera.

This wouldn't be a problem if quitting to the main menu didn't result in me loosing all my progress and having to restart from the beginning, because this game only saves when it wants to.

I kinda want to start again and give it another chance, but what if I make the effort of trying to immerse myself into this game once more and going through the whole intro only to end up loosing an hour of my life once more to some random bug, because the game wont let me save?

Because of this I feel justified in not recommending the game. Maybe I'm being petty but that was a pretty sour first impression.

Game's good.

Unironically the best game in the Sonic series since Sonic Mania.

I know absolutely nothing about Record of Lodoss War (though it was easy to guess that every character other than Deedlit was dead), but this game was an absolute banger. Couldn't recommend it more to anyone who likes metroidvanias, specially if you prefer the style of the Castlevania ones.

I played it almost at the end of the year but it is without a doubt one of my favourite games of 2022. Yes I know it came out in 2021, shut up.

It's a testament to this game's potential that so many people like it despite it's many bad design choices. Unfortunately, that just means this game is a worse version of what it could have been.



The common defense of those bad designs is that they are that way on purpose, to put you in the skin of the slugcat, who is apparently trapped in an endless loop of death and rebirth in an unforgiving world or something, but instead it feels like the game is hard for the sake of being hard.

The one thing the game really has going for it is the often praised AI, which does make the creatures feel "alive" when they interact with each other, at the cost of making them seem like they're in a constant epileptic seizure due to the procedural animations.

The one thing that makes this game a chore to play has to be the Karma system. Every time you rest at a saveroom with a full belly you gain karma. Everytime you die you loose it. And Karma is necessary to progress from area to area. The problem with this is that it makes regular gameplay feel like padded. Dieing means spending time looking for food and hybernating. Get bad luck and that could means having to repeat the same cycle four or more times. All to cross a door that you have no guarantee will have food close by when you cross it. And new enemies can easily kill you if you don't know what they do, with most of them having a way to end your fun in one hit, so it's not unlikely that you'll find yourself loosing good chunks of progress to something you simply couldn't know how to avoid without dying to it.

In short, this game requires too much trial and error to get away with how punishing dieing is.

And that's not to mention the rain mechanic. After 6 to 13 minutes (according to the wiki) if you haven't found a shelter you wil die. This means you have only that much time to explore AND find food each run, discouraging what's supposed to be one of the games pillars: exploration. And while you can at least rest without finding food to survive the rain, doing so makes the game basically unplayable by having slugcat fall asleep every few seconds. Another mechanic that feels like it's there to punish you without adding much if anything to the game.

I feel like I should also mention that the game has guidance in the form of a yellow guy that points you to certain things. But this guidance has a frequency that feels random, is often obtuse, and the first place of interest it takes you to is an npc that you can only interact with by klling her, probably without even realizing it, and doind so changes how the guidance works into a far worse mehanic. So it ends up feeling aimless and nothing else. That's without mentioning that the game doesn't even bother to explain most of the movement options it has, expecting you to figure them out on your wn despite how janky the controlls are.

This game will only appeal to masochists or people with a high enough tollerance for bull dung to endure the jank and enjoy what's good about it. And b the time you're ready to make that decision you will be far past the point where you can refund it. If you can get it for free then it's worth giving it a try, but otherwise stay away from it. If you do buy it, don't hesitate to use guides to figure out all the obtuse stuff in the game. Figuring it out blind is just not worth the hustle.

Personally i've given it as many chances as I'm willing to give, and after 9 hours I feel confident that I've seen enough to regret my purchase.